What’s New in WordPress 4.9

WordPress 4.9 was released just few hours ago. It is the second and last major WordPress release of 2017 with some exciting new features and enhancements. In this article, we will show you what’s new in WordPress 4.9 and which features you should try after updating your websites.

4.9 is a major WordPress release, and unless you are on a managed WordPress hosting service, you will have to manually initiate the update.

Important: Don’t forget to create a complete WordPress backup before starting the update.

New Theme Browsing Experience in The Customizer

WordPress 4.9 brings several improvements to the customizer. These changes offer a better user experience and a new set of tools for developers.

Previewing and changing themes directly from customizer is now more user friendly. You can view all your installed themes in the preview panel and click on the live preview button to load them in customizer.

You can also browse and search WordPress.org themes and install them directly from customizer.

Save and Schedule Changes in The Customizer

WordPress 4.9 brings changesets to theme customizer. It is like post revisions but for your theme changes. You can store changes without applying them.

This new feature also allows you to easily share a preview of those changes with anyone. Simply copy the preview URL and send it to any user. They will be able to see the new changes without login.

WordPress 4.9 also allows you to easily schedule theme changes to be automatically published later.

Theme developers will now be able to use these new changes in the customizer JS API. These changes will allow them to add better controls, beautiful outer panels, and display notifications on screen.

New Gallery Widget in WordPress 4.9

WordPress 4.8 introduced new media widgets which included rich text, audio, image, and video. WordPress 4.9 builds up on that with the introduction of the new gallery widget.

This new widgets allows you to create a native WordPress gallery and add it to your WordPress sidebar or any widget ready areas.

Just like the native WordPress galleries, this widget is also limited in terms of functionality. If you want a more powerful gallery with albums, then you need to look at a third-party plugin like Envira Gallery.

Add Media Button in Text Widget

WordPress 4.9 has fixed this by adding the ‘Add Media’ button in the text widget. Now you can easily select or upload an image directly inside the text widget.

OEmbed Support Outside Post Content

Previously automatic embeds didn’t work in areas other than post content. With WordPress 4.9, oEmbeds will now work in text widgets and other areas as well.

Shortcode in Sidebar Text Widgets

WordPress didn’t allow shortcode execution in text widgets. Users had to explicitly enable shortcodes in text widgets. WordPress 4.9 will finally change that and users will be able to add shortcodes in text widgets out of the box.

New Code Editing Experience in WordPress 4.9

WordPress allows you to add HTML/CSS code at various places like theme editor, custom CSS panel, or in custom HTML widget.

Previously, these areas were plain text boxes and didn’t look or act like a proper code editor.

WordPress 4.9 has changed that by adding syntax highlighting, code suggestions, and auto-completion into those areas.

If you have ever faced syntax error when editing your theme, then this enhancement will automatically fix many common mistakes that cause such errors.

If you don’t want to use the syntax highlighting feature, then you can still easily disable it. Simply go to your profile page and uncheck the syntax highlighting option.

One of the big usability issues beginners faced was directly making changes from WordPress built-in editor without fully understanding the consequences. A slightest mistake would lead to a syntax error and making their websites inaccessible.

WordPress 4.9 now shows a warning to users when they access the editor.

It will also show users helpful tips and point them to custom CSS panel in the customizer.

However, many users access the editor not to make changes but to quickly look up code. Particularly when they are working on child themes. To help those users, the editor will now recursively show files and folder in the sidebar for easier browsing of all files in a theme folder.

Under The Hood Changes

WordPress 4.9 also brings several great changes for developers as well. Here are some of those under the hood improvements.

Thanks for the information. I was getting all excited about the syntax highlighting and was wondering why it wasn’t appearing in my text editor, then I read this article and realised it was just for the customizer. To be honest, I’m sick of reading about the customizer, I wish they would actually work on something useful for a change, like actually improving the writing experience!

They had given what’s new section some information, like gallery widget etc. This blog explained everything. Thanks. In WordPress dot com site sidebar widget displaying recent posts from jetpack enabled self-hosted site with featured images and title link. Is there any way to display featured image thumbnail of recent posts sidebar widget on WordPress site?

Dang, when I was reading about 4.9 last week, I didn’t realize the schedule changes was for themes instead of posts. It’d be far more useful to be able to schedule category changes or updates for posts than it would be for themes.

I completely agree! I have several clients that want to be able to schedule updates to pages–like planning out sales events for the next month, changing displayed prices at the end of sale or end of the year, etc. WP has definitely matured into a solid CMS, but scheduling CONTENT updates is still one of the core CMS functions missing, and seems much more important that scheduling theme updates.

Thank you for the New WordPress and all the improved features. I have upgraded to New WordPress, but I am not seeing the “Press This” bookmarlet and button under “Available Tools”. The Press This feature as am concern is what makes WordPress the blogger’s delight.
I await your response.

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